10 000 Kwacha

Zambia's inflation in the early 1990s was severe enough that the 10,000 Kwacha — unthinkable as a denomination just a decade earlier — was already a workaday note by the time this issue entered circulation. The Third Republic transition of 1991, which ended Kenneth Kaunda's 27-year rule, left the new Chiluba government managing an economy where copper export revenues had collapsed and the kwacha had shed most of its value against hard currencies. De La Rue's London production kept the note technically credible at a moment when the issuing authority's own credibility was under strain.

Within a decade, the denomination was rendered trivial by further inflation, and a redenomination eventually followed in 2013.